


The Empty Space

by gloss



Category: No. 6
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Chromatic Character, M/M, Theatre
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-19
Updated: 2011-11-19
Packaged: 2017-10-26 07:16:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/280277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloss/pseuds/gloss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nezumi is a little Hamlet, a lot Ophelia, and Shion makes a great Horatio.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Empty Space

**Author's Note:**

  * For [highboys](https://archiveofourown.org/users/highboys/gifts).



> University AU. Like the original canon, this takes place in an alternate-Japanese-dominated culture, a rough amalgam of SE Asian, North American, and Japanese cultures. Title and in-text quotation from [Peter Brook](http://books.google.ca/books/about/The_empty_space.html?id=T-ZTAAAAMAAJ).

Ordinarily, Nezumi would never have noticed someone as retiring and apparently unremarkable as Shion. Ordinarily, Nezumi would never have gone near this acting workshop for non-majors, not unless he were looking for reasons to despair and rage. Ordinarily, none of this should ever have happened.

Not much, however, had ever been close to ordinary for Nezumi.

He stood in front of the class and tried not to smirk at their well-scrubbed, hopeful faces. "Right," he said. "This is Acting for the Rest of Us. If you're a theatre major, you're in the wrong room."

Two girls scraped back their chairs and left the room arm-in-arm.

"This term, we are going to explore the magical world of drama," Nezumi continued. Dr. Porando had provided him with notes for teaching, but he'd taken enough acting classes to be able to do this speech from memory. "Together, we will discover how to use your voice and body as your instrument –"

He paused, knowing that someone, probably a fraternity brother, was going to snicker at the phrase. He was right, though one of those laughing was a slight girl with long hair.

"Your body as instrument," he said again, and savored their discomfort - darting eyes, elbows nudging each other, slumping in their seats. "In addition..."

The workshop met in the all-purpose room in the basement of the drama department; the students were scattered across three levels of risers ringing three walls. Pipes snaked across the low ceiling, spitting steam and banging with the anxiety of the entire building. Nezumi had to raise his voice to be heard.

He had just begun reading through the syllabus when he realized the students had shifted their attention.

The door behind him, the one that led to the sub-basement and janitor's supply closet, banged open, then closed, then open again as someone threw himself into the room.

"Is this theater?" the boy asked, falling, catching himself on the edge of a riser and stumbling forward. "Is this?"

Nezumi leaned against the wall and crossed his arms. "You tell me."

The child – he really was a child, chubby in the cheeks but lanky and recently grown in the limbs – shook his head. "I mean, is this –"

"Theater," Nezumi said. "I don't know. Do you think it is?"

The child clutched his bag to his chest and dug madly for his mobile phone. "TH 100, room B2, Acting for the Rest of Us?"

"Maybe."

The child looked desperately around the room, but none of the students met his eye. As a rule, people never got involved if they did not have to, Nezumi knew this very well. Even a trivial case of classroom teasing would go ignored and unresolved if the majority of people had their way.

"Tell me," Nezumi said, pushing off from the wall and loping slowly towards the kid, "what do you think theater is?"

"Ahh..." The kid pressed his lips together until they paled into a thin, tight line. He started to look away from Nezumi; then, to his credit, he lifted his chin a fraction and steadied his gaze. "Drama. Performance of, um. Words and music...?"

Nezumi rolled his eyes. "Your dictionary could use some improvement."

"Give me a minute –" The kid jabbed a finger at his phone's screen and bobbed his head, waiting impatiently. "I can't get a signal. I need to –"

"Sit down," Nezumi said and turned back to the class.

"No," the kid said.

"What?"

"No," he said again, a little more quietly. When Nezumi turned back to him, the guy swallowed visibly. "Please tell me, without whimsy or nonsense, precisely which class this is."

Nezumi waved his hand. "You had it right."

"And is there a printed syllabus, as the university requires?"

Nezumi pointed at the stack of photocopies. "Plenty."

"Hmm," the kid said, flipping through the stapled papers. "Your grading schema adds up to 119%. That can't be correct."

More than half the class chuckled at that. Their loyalties were starting to switch.

Nezumi shrugged elaborately. "Not my schema. I'm the TA for this class."

"Where is Professor Porando?" the kid demanded.

He was turning out to be quite the pushy little pretty boy. Nezumi hadn't even noticed his looks until just now; something about them snuck up on you.

That was something Nezumi would like to know. However, he replied, "Elsewhere." Then, addressing the class as a whole, he added, "Any other questions?"

After a moment, the kid raised his hand. "What are your qualifications?"

"Excuse me?"

"Your qualifications to teach this class. What are they?"

Nezumi shoved his hand through his hair and exhaled slowly through his nose. Patience: he needed patience. He'd never had much to spare. "What's your name, kiddo?"

"Shion," he said pleasantly and smiled. Someone had taught him very good manners; he wore his courtesy with the lightness and confidence that only came from privilege and high expectations. "Yours? As well as your qualifications."

He wasn't getting paid _nearly_ enough for this.

*

He needed, however, any and all spare change he could get. Porando had him teaching two sections of the stupid workshop at a third the rate official teaching assistants received.

Nezumi was – or, since he had always been a stubborn and contrary soul, he _should_ have been – grateful for that much. Official TAs, after all, were graduate students, as well as unionized; he had yet to finish his bachelor's degree.

He dressed from the costume closets; he slept in the arts and literature library; he ate from the discarded plates in the campus cafes.

He lived up to his name. He always had.

At dusk one evening, he was making a circuit of the coffee shop adjacent to the Sciences complex, helping himself to packets of raw sugar and a cup of cold tea, when the sight before him pulled him up short.

The slight figure, bent nearly double over his laptop, was Shion. Artificial light from the pathways outside frosted his delicate profile and bleached out the ends of his dark, silky hair.

Momentarily, he looked like a film negative of himself, an inversion, a ghost.

Then he saw Nezumi and smiled his lovely, courteous smile. "Sensei!"

"Don't call me that," Nezumi said as he took the seat opposite Shion. Balanced precariously on the windowsill at Shion's elbow was a plate with a half-eaten sandwich and pile of untouched chips. "Going to finish that?"

"Please," Shion said. He handed Nezumi the plate. "Help yourself."

He knew he ought to save the sandwich, at the least, but as their conversation continued, he forgot his restraint.

"Did you make that?" Shion started to reach over, then paused. His hand hovered between them, pale, the fingers cocked. When Nezumi shifted his position, Shion's hand moved the rest of the way. He plucked the edge of Nezumi's black shawl. "This."

"No," Nezumi said. The shawl was a large triangular monstrosity, crocheted who knew how many years ago for the flower-seller to wear in a production of _Oliver!_.

"Oh. I –" Shion seemed to remember himself and snatched back his hand. "I like it. On you. You, I mean, I like." He coughed into a fist. "You wear it well."

Nezumi raised an eyebrow. "What are you trying to say?"

Shion wove his fingers together, then released them, dropping his hands into his lap. His brow knitted and his lips moved silently. "Well, that is –"

Nezumi twisted the end of the scarf around one finger and cocked his head. "Go on."

Shion glanced out the window, then back to his laptop screen. "I have quite a bit of work to do, sensei."

"Don't call me that."

"But –"

"Don't," Nezumi said more firmly. "What are you working on?"

"Lab notes," Shion said. "Sustainable organic chemistry for –"

"Sustainable what for who?"

"I study environmental engineering." Shion's tone was conversational and enthusiastic; he leaned forward, smiling, as if excited to share this bit of information. "That is to say, the application of rational scientific and technological solutions to issues of –"

Slumping back in his chair, Nezumi waved his hand. "Blah blah, master of nature, delusions of god status."

"No!" Shion sucked in one cheek. After a long moment, he added, far more mildly, "no, that's not it at all."

Nezumi chewed the last handful of chips and looked Shion over, slow and intent, enjoying the way the kid tried to be brave, but eventually succumbed to fidgeting. When he had swallowed the chips and taken a few sips of Shion's water, he said, "So your people, they don't remove entire forests to ease the construction of new highways and subdivisions?"

Shion frowned. "Not without careful study and the application of –"

"Rational solutions, I heard you," Nezumi said. Before Shion could say anything else in defense of his indefensible career path, Nezumi put in, "Plans for the weekend?"

Shion excitedly showed him the spreadsheet he kept on his computer. He allotted his study time in half-hour units, from seven in the morning to eleven at night.

*

Shion did not have time to get lonely. His schedule simply would not allow it. All the same, his best friend Safu was halfway around the world on an exchange program. Talking to her every other day and keeping the instant messenger window open the rest of the time was not enough to ward off the whiffs of loneliness.

Today, Safu was complaining about the conditions in her seminars. Everyone interrupted her, she said, no one respected her point of view. "I can't stand it."

He didn't like to argue with her; Safu always won the few spats they had, through sheer stubborn will. All the same, he wanted to offer an alternative. He said, hesitantly, his pulse loud in his head, "Perhaps we need to listen more and say less."

"Where did you hear that?"

"My acting class," Shion said.

Safu's laughter came loud and ragged with hiccups over the bad mobile connection. "You aren't!" When he did not reply, she gasped for breath and finally said, "You're really taking that? Why?"

"I like it."

"You like easy grades, you mean."

"No," he said. "I only have a 73 at the moment."

Her silence said everything. For Safu, anything below a 90 was at once inconceivable and grounds for utter despair. He doubted she had ever considered that grade could _be_ in the seventies.

"You've gone mad," Safu finally said. Her voice was little more than a muffled croak. When she got upset or overwhelmed, she tended to pillow her head on her crossed arms: that was probably how she was sitting now, sagging against herself. "I'm losing you."

"Don't be ridiculous. I'm right here."

"And I'm all the way around the world and you'll be lost before I get back."

"You're overreacting," he said. He knew that was the truth, but on the other hand, she was _Safu_. She'd always been the smarter of the two of them; he had always deferred to her.

The conflict between the two facts was enough to make his breath catch in his throat.

"I'm fine," he said, hoarse. "I have to go."

He really did have to go; Topics in Civil Engineering began in less than five minutes. But there was no point telling her that.

"I'll miss you," Safu said sadly. "Shion."

*

Shion was a terrible actor. Just execrable, honestly.

But he was an extraordinary student; even Nezumi saw that. He did all the readings on Porando's ridiculous syllabus and even quoted from Brook's _The Empty Space_ at length. When his scene partners fumbled a line or an entrance, he was there to help.

He was also stiff as a board and strangely soprano-voice'd when "acting".

For an actor, he was a wonderful stage manager. But since Nezumi wasn't about to keep attendance or record marks, Shion made an able assistant.

*

Nezumi had a way of turning up at the oddest times. He had quickly learned Shion's schedule (it was simple enough, admittedly: when he wasn't in class, he studied at the library or in the basement of the student centre, in preferred spots, then returned to his apartment by 20:00) and would appear, testy and occasionally jittery, standing silently over Shion's table until he was acknowledged.

Shion tested this; their record was 17 minutes, 26 seconds, during which he fought to concentrate on finishing reading conference proceedings. Nezumi's hands, frosty-dry with torn cuticles, were within his line of sight, and it was all he could do not to offer him some lotion. Nezumi's vanity, it appeared, did not quite extend to sensible self-care.

That was hardly surprising.

Nezumi dragged him to the department office. The administrator was a severe but pretty middle-aged woman who shook her head as soon as she saw Nezumi. "They're not in."

"Porando?" he asked.

"Away," she said. "And Fugu is in a meeting."

He kicked the leg of the nearest chair. "I could just wait."

She looked at him over the top of her glasses. "You'd be waiting a long time, Apache. Just leave them be."

Nezumi opened his mouth, but then closed it without speaking. He knocked his shoulder against Shion's as he turned to sweep out of the office.

"Why does she call you that?" Shion asked when they were in the elevator.

Nezumi did not answer. Shion said, a little more loudly, "Why does –"

"I heard you." Nezumi bit his lip and only continued when they were outside. He stopped under an old oak tree, hitched up his shoulders against the cold, and said, "She thinks it's funny. Because I'm an _indigene_ , or I look like one."

"Oh," Shion heard himself say. He had never met an _indigene_ ; in primary school, they learned that there were hardly any left. They'd disappeared as the country modernized and industrialized. Shame bit at him when he realized he'd never thought to question just how a population of people could have "disappeared".

"That's all you have to say?"

"No, no, of course not." Yet Shion could not think of what else to say. Now that he thought about it, Nezumi did not look quite like most people: his height, his grace, the attractive androgyny that wafted around him, all those things might very well be due to his ethnicity. His silver eyes, too, wide as they were, the lids without folds...

Those eyes were fastened on him as Nezumi's mouth curled up into a sneer. "Planning your escape from the savage?"

A clutch of students hovered in the doorway, cigarettes clutched in their fists, their faces turned away from the wind.

They looked now, as Shion took a step and closed the distance between them. _Listen_ , he told himself, and his breath left his body, left him hollow and hungry. As he tilted his head and his lips parted, his eidetic memory read a passage back to him:

>   
> What, however, was this hunger? Was it a hunger for the invisible, a hunger for a reality deeper than the fullest form of everyday life—or was it a hunger for the missing things of life, a hunger, in fact, for buffers against reality?   
> 

As their lips met, Nezumi's bare hand pushed through Shion's hair and yanked him the rest of the way. Their noses crushed together, Shion up on his toes, the kiss was hardly graceful, barely tolerable. The warmth that fell in torrents through him, however, was dizzying; Nezumi's chapped lips and sharp teeth became his entire world.

*

Today, Nezumi waited three minutes, fingers tapping irregularly on the edge of the table, while Shion finished typing a lab report.

When he lowered his laptop's screen, Shion said, "How are you?"

Nezumi did not believe in pleasantries. He tugged Shion's jacket off the back of his chair and tossed it in his lap. "C'mon. Want you to meet someone."

Outside, the day was overcast, clouds barely clearing the skyscrapers, the air damp and cold. Bare tree branches clacked and grumbled as Nezumi hurried across the Sciences quadrangle, ducking off the path when he could; Shion followed, catching a toe on a root, tripping through sodden leaves half-rotted already, until Nezumi drew up suddenly outside an outbuilding assigned to Veterinary Sciences.

He banged on the metal door with his fist. "Hey, you!"

"Go away!" The voice that yelled through the door was hoarse and deep, so angry that Shion took an involuntary step backward.

"It's me!" Nezumi called.

"Don't care, asshole. Busy here!" The barking grew more agitated. "Fuck, look what you did!"

"Fine," Nezumi muttered. He turned quickly and strode away; Shion had to hurry to keep up. "Jackass."

"That was your friend?" Shion asked.

"Something," Nezumi said. "Not exactly. Yes."

Shion did not know what to say, so he just matched his pace to Nezumi's longer legs. The raw wind bit at his cheeks and hands, so he drove his fists into his jacket pockets and hoped they got inside soon.

"They inherited a rooming house," Nezumi said as they made their way back onto the main avenue, "from someone, don't know who. They run it and do their studies full-time." When his phone chimed, he opened it, checked the screen, and closed it again, all without slowing down. "Text me later? They say text later." He shook his head and added, "where was I?"

"Rooming house," Shion said.

"Why would I text later? I'm here now. Idiot." Nezumi tossed the hair out of his eyes again. "Fuck, it's cold. What?"

"Rooming house," Shion said again. "Is that where you live?"

"What?" Nezumi looked genuinely confused. "In that shithole? No, of course not."

"Oh." Shion looked away. "I just thought –"

Nezumi cocked his head, smiling a little. The expression was out of place on his face, unfamiliar and slightly uncomfortable, but Shion smiled back. "Funny," Nezumi said. "I never thought to ask."

"For a room?"

Nezumi shrugged and buried his chin in his shawl. His cheeks curved with his smile. "For help."

That wasn't _funny_ , Shion thought. It was many things, but not funny.

*

The wasps had been colonizing the ductwork and stairwells of the university for years, but it was only when the chancellor's daughter was stung by one that action was taken.

The exterminators were making a sweep of the library's upper floors when they stumbled across Nezumi. They were swathed in safety suits and looked like the Michelin man on the moon, faceless, roly-poly.

Their radios to their supervisor did not work that far into the stacks, so they dragged him out. One took his wrists, the other his knees, and they double-stepped through the poisonous fog.

He was the color of ash, skin and lips alike, when they dropped him onto the loading dock and called for an ambulance.

The university paper's story - "Library Squatter Fogged Out" - got picked up by the city media outlets, and from there, to a few national outlets.

*

"What the hell is this?" Nezumi shook out his gift and held it at arm's length. Though he'd been in the hospital for over a week, his voice was still worse than hoarse, something like froggy and squeaky all at once.

"A new scarf," Shion said. He had gone to visit Safu's Gran hoping to learn how to knit; when she heard what he wanted to make, she told him it was easier, not to mention faster, if she did it for him.

She thought he had a girlfriend to give this to. When he swore her to secrecy, not to tell Safu, her eyes lit up and she nodded eagerly. "Of course, sweetheart." She winked. " _Of course._ "

She had made something beautiful, wide-winged enough to wrap three times around his body, in a soft, tweed-flecked cashmere yarn light as fog. Shion hadn't been able to wrap it until just before meeting Nezumi, because he kept petting it and letting one of the tails run like water over the back of his hand.

But now, with Nezumi squinting at the piece as if it were giving off a noxious stench, Shion started to doubt the gift.

"Yours has moth holes," he said, and hated how timid he sounded. He coughed to clear his throat. "And half of it melted when it got caught in the candle."

Nezumi snorted, smiling as he remembered. "Yeah. So?"

"I should have left it at home," Shion said. "In your wardrobe."

Scowling, Nezumi shook out the shawl and let it drift downward over his chest. "It's pretty. What wardrobe?"

Shion grinned. He had never been good at keeping secrets. "With the rest of your things."

He did not know what sizes Nezumi wore, yet he knew Nezumi's body below the level of words and measurements. He'd been able to select several sweaters, a few pairs of trousers, and an array of plain shirts, just by closing his eyes and picturing Nezumi.

"It's not charity," he insisted, though Nezumi was still silent, watching him, wary, his face pinched. "It just makes sense –"

Nezumi stroked the shawl. "Sentimental ass."

Shion nodded enthusiastically. "That's right."

Nezumi's smile was crooked, but it straightened out, widening, the longer he looked at Shion.


End file.
